The flight attendant approached. “Yes, sir?”
“Two glasses of the Sioux Valley Meritage red, please.”
“Right away.”
He turned to me. “Not great, but passable.”
“I don’t usually drink before five.”
“We’re in the air! It’s five o’clock somewhere. Besides, this is vacation.”
I turned to him and smiled. Or tried to. “Right. Vacation. Which means I don’t want to talk about how I’ve been crossed. I’d much rather talk about something a little less…intense.”
He laughed. “I hear that. Good enough for me.”
The flight attendant returned with our wine. “Thanks, sweetheart,” Ryan said.
Something niggled in my stomach. I wasn’t sure what it was, except that Ryan calling the attractive blond stewardess “sweetheart” kind of hit me the wrong way.
The very wrong way.
Get over yourself, Ruby. Someone like Ryan Steel would never look twice at you. And even if he did? You wouldn’t know what to do with him.
My lot in life was to stay single. To take care of myself. I’d been doing it for seventeen years. I didn’t need to change my way of life now.
Truthfully, I was scared to change. Scared of men. Scared of feeling anything for a man.
Ryan interrupted my thoughts. “So what do you want to talk about?”
Good question. He was a winemaker, and I was interested in wine. “Wine?”
“I do know something about that.”
He swirled the wine around and then stuck his nose into the glass and inhaled. His nose was so far in I thought he might have wine dripping from it when he pulled it out. But he didn’t.
“Nice nose.”
I touched my nose. “Huh?”
He laughed. “I mean the nose of the wine. Its fragrance. But your nose is nice too.”
Oh. My. God. Embarrassment swept through me. What a moron I was. And here I’d thought I knew a few things about wine. “Of course.”
“What do you smell on the nose?”
I stuck my nose into the glass.
“Swirl it around first,” he said. “To release the aroma.”
“Sure. Right.” I swirled the wine and then sniffed it. “I don’t know. Red plum, I think. Maybe a little vanilla?”
“Good! I got those too. Also some tobacco. A little shitake mushroom.”
Shitake mushroom? Was he serious? “Okay.”
“You don’t seem to believe me.”
“I’m not even sure what shitake mushrooms smell like. Do mushrooms even have a smell? I mean, outside of soup.”